I found this article absolutely fascinating - I didn't even know such a job existed!
Many years ago, when I was young and foolish, I thought being a crop duster pilot was the bees knees; also easier to get into with low hours, and who knows, maybe after spraying enough potato, a coveted airline job. Little did I know! It turns out the level of skill required to do the job is very high, the lifestyle not so great when you get older, and no, it's not necessarily easier to get into.
Ultimately I didn't become a pilot, but an engineer. Looking back, I'm happy with my choice and my life as it is now. Only occasionally do I watch aviation videos on YouTube and wonder "what if".
Thank you for a really cool article - and kudos to the guy drying cherries with his little Robinson!
I do believe it probably says something about preconceived notions that, of the mere half dozen comments accumulated so far, this mistake has been made twice already.
I don't tend to read the name of the author of an article, because there is essentially zero chance that I'll remember the name and frankly I don't care who they are.
I suspect that most people tend to read in their own gender in absence of other cues? I have a strong memory of going through the first chapter of a book completely misgendering the protaganist. Fortunately it wasn't a "doctor -> man" bias situation, just "person walking through park describing view/situation", otherwise I'd have been super angry at myself.
I was taking the HN preferred side of giving the poster the benefit of the best possible interpretation, which in this case means in the condition of proper pronoun usage, English defaults to male pronouns for the unknown, or sometimes an ambiguous they. I don't read names in the modern age because I have no clue what foreign names are male or female. Nor would I be so bold as to assume.
That's funny- as I read it, I was definitely thinking the author was female. Not sure what that means, if anything, but I didn't even check the author's name until after noticing a bunch of people saying "he".
Sometime in the past (maybe 10 or
15 years ago?) someone had the
idea of using the downwash of
helicopters hovering over the
cherry trees to blow the branches
around and shake the water off
the cherries.
There is nothing normal about that idea.
I bet paying a pilot, who operates at price to cover their own expenses, fuel and a paycheck, is still less expensive than the partial loss of any harvest that receives this coverage, and crop dusting pilots are technically an equivalent operation, but I’m thinking that there are better ways to keep cherries dry, and that rain showers aren’t the only thing water log a cherry tree, right?
For whom? I think anyone who'd been near an operating helicopter and thought "gee, I need a really big fan once in a while" would've eventually put two and two together.
> * there are better ways to keep cherries dry, and that rain showers aren’t the only thing water log a cherry tree, right?*
Think about the plus sides- the grower doesn't have to buy a bunch of fans, deal with maintenance, or do any other number of things, and the helicopter pilot gets "guaranteed income" (though, like all growing is, that depends a lot upon the season), flying hours, and can so other things in the waiting time. Maria, the author of the blog post, mentions elsewhere that she makes jewelry in her waiting time, which she can then sell or do whatever with.
It's a big different from your standard 9-to-5 job, but personally, I think it's a beautiful symbiotic relationship.
It's a drop in the bucket compared to all the other resources used to grow and transport them. Agriculture is costly across the board. But I for one want my year-round access to every food on the planet.
> But I for one want my year-round access to every food on the planet.
I'd like to think you're being sarcastic here, but fear you may not be.
What's wrong with food being seasonal and local? Personally, I like it that what's available varies with the season; it gives me an extra incentive to try different things.
Besides, if the person really means it, they probably have no idea what "every food on the planet" means.
The result of industrialized food production and distribution has been a steady ongoing loss of food diversity. You can search for the stats from the FAO. I believe it's 75% of food diversity gone in the last century. 12 species providing for 75% of the world's nutritional needs.
The current system does not have food diversity as its goal, let alone taste or nutrition. It does a good job at nourishing the pockets of big businesses, that have an interest in turning all manner of food production and distribution into economies of scale by commoditizing (as in "commoditize your complements") the product. Uniformity and shelf-life win, farmers lose.
I've seen all this happen right where I live (Panama). Tasteless tomatoes, thanks to having Nestle as the main buyer. A local cultivar of Dioscorea (Yam) almost gone, when Frito Lay's told farmers what cultivar they wanted, which exposed the local cultivar to a disease. Countless edible plants and fruits, better suited for the climate and environment, have become simply unknown to people, as cattle farming took over thanks to the introduction of herbicides (it's also destroying the Darien rainforest, and violently displacing indigenous communities, btw). I could go on and on. Meanwhile, you have technicians (Ingenieros Agronomos) talking about such great achievements as tropicalized potatoes. It makes me think of the Great Irish Famine.
So there you have it, food from all around the planet, and the whole planet producing mostly the same. We are going full circle from abundance to scarcity. You have to then question people inferring rather unfoundedly that it is the abundance of food (along a sedentary lifestyle) what is driving the obesity-related chronic disease pandemic. You have to wonder what is abundance. Mindlessly following the commoditization trend has driven us to unquestioningly counting food only by such fungible measures as USD, kg, and calories, as if humans fed on food like cars feed on gas. And this brings us to that process that I think is parallel to the commoditization of food: the turning of humans into machines.
He says the cherries split or mold if left wet for a short time, so he has to be on call in all daylight hours (17h) ... but what about when it rains in the 7 nighttime hours? Is it the sun-drying of the wet cherries that causes the damage?
I wonder about these sort of pieces whether they're just equipping others to drive them or if business. He says it's already highly competitive, sounds like a firm could drive the soloists out of business by undercutting them (maybe that's happening now), then pushing up prices later.
I can't believe you can't undercut with a massive set of fans on a "cherry picker"-type vehicle (maybe paired with a shaker-harvest system).
Heh I didn't pick that up until I started reading the comments on the blog. Pleasant surprise. Wonder how she got into piloting heli... I looked into it at one point in my life. It's expensive. They recommend joining the military and hoping to get selected for heli school. I've always wanted to drop people off on mountains. Looks so fun.
> but what about when it rains in the 7 nighttime hours? Is it the sun-drying of the wet cherries that causes the damage?
It's possible that rot is a long-term problem (cherries wet for more than one day) and the splitting is indeed caused very quickly by the rain / sun combination, but I think the issue is that the work is just too dangerous during night hours.
If the rot is only a long term issue then "within 4 hours" would seem a good constraint on drying? Similar to what you'd get on average after overnight rain.
Makes me wonder if they couldn't use poly tunnels.
Probably cost vs benefit analysis. Day time benefit is there where the cost for night shift is much more expensive. Business decision drives a lot but sometimes it's safety. To use the heli at night there's a lot of extra things that would be required, which cost money.
Dangerous and depending on location of the orchard - in violation of noise ordinances.
As cool as this all seems....if you happen to live near an orchard, or in my case, the helipad - it appears to be a horrible inefficient and nuisance way to solve the issue.
Perhaps it's just too dangerous to do it at night. You have hardly any visibility in low level flying.
The pilot may not be insured in this time (it's likely very expensive), or the pilot is not licenced to fly helicopters at low altitudes at night.
A few years ago in the Netherlands there was an Apache that flew into a high voltage power line at night, even though he had military grade night vision gear. So even then it's not easy.
In the aftermath it took multiple months before his mistake was fully fixed.
Wires can be really difficult to see during the day. Forget it at night.
Flying at night is great. The air is usually smooth and stable. The lights below are nice to look at, especially near water. If things go wrong at night however, it can get ugly. The fatality rate for nighttime aviation accidents is significantly higher.
Yes, assumed too dangerous, but was hoping for a definitive answer, it must surely rain at night pretty often in this area. If that still ruins the crop then the economics are changed considerably.
I think you'd need a lot of very big fans. They need to be able to get the water off the cherries FAST, so they'd need to be powerful enough to physically shake the water off of all the cherries, not just circulate air until the water evaporates. The cherries would split long before they were dry.
Another similar job: frost protection of vineyards using helicopters. It is used in conditions of thermal inversion (colder air near the ground, warmer air in the upper layer), in those conditions the rotor downwash raises the temperature near the ground. More info:
I know you're being facetious but these are the types of industries and activities that don't get the SV disruption treatment, partly because nobody there knows about them. It's partly why I love when these "off-topic" posts get made here. There's now a lot more people read this post and who are now aware of this strange thing that keeps our world working in the way we expect it to- and might have ideas on how to make it better.
I was being facetious, but I also love these kind of stories. Like the one last week about the guy sells onions on the internet. We live in a weird world.
I'm really more surprised that a truck with a boom-mounted rotor that simulates helicopter downwash wouldn't do a good enough job. Clearly someone has to have thought of that (note that they already tried fans), so I wonder what the difference is. The operational costs have to be a small fraction of a helicopter's.
The fans they were likely talking about are probably the horizontal-style fans you see in orchards for (mainly) frost prevention (they look like small windmills).
But why not very large rotor fans - maybe mounted HVLS fans, perhaps a bit larger, and maybe spinning a bit faster. Surely something like those would be cheaper to install and run 24/7 - assuming they worked as well?
Then you would need access roads throughout the orchards so your land use would be less efficient. Same as with tree farms and why they transport them with helicopters, too:
> They put fans on tall poles in their orchards and run blowers up and down the rows. But this isn’t usually effective.
From my armchair I wonder what the reason is for not having a ground-based solution. Running a small vehicle (lawnmower-size?) with a fan mounted on top between the trees seems like a much more economic way to have the same effect.
Is there not enough space between the trees to pass through (but then, how would they harvest)?
Do the trees suffer, branches break if the air flow comes from below / from the side?
So 3hp/sqft (power/(area/time) would be better but we don't know how fast the chopper is moving while it blows the water away). That's not that much power. That's on the same order of magnitude as snow blowers
Obviously not all hp are equal and you get into a discussion of cfm, specific impulse, etc, etc. but power/area should be a pretty ok proxy for drying power.
It shouldn't be that hard to build something that looks like the bastard child of a concrete pumper and a pine mulch blower that can either fit in the bed of a pickup or runs off a tractor PTO and can apply more than enough airflow to destroy your crop if you use it wrong. Maybe include a big rubber hose (like those temporary water mains) on the vehicle to give the tree trunks a good whack as you drive by.
> I wonder what the reason is for not having a ground-based solution. Running a small vehicle (lawnmower-size?) with a fan mounted on top
I imagine the important part of the "drying" process/action is being able to give the branches a bloody good shake to dislodge the water droplets. It's likely that even very large fans aren't capable of moving that much air (compared to a helicopter's blades). Then there's also the question of even if you could trundle around the orchard with a set of fans able to push that much air I can imagine it would be comedically unstable and dangerous :)
The article mentioned that smaller helicopters can't do the job because they don't move enough air. It likely has to be done from above because there just isn't enough ground clearance to do it from below.
The capital costs to get ground-supported fans above the trees and the maintenance costs of operating them are likely much higher than just buying your own helicopter and training as a RW pilot. Given that, the farmer might as well rent the helicopter and RW pilot.
I imagine a 10m fan mounted in a moving carriage, on a serpentine track supported by tall poles, and powered by electrified rails in the track. Then you'd need a shed for the working fan, the backup fan, and the repair parts, plus the generator and fuel storage. It would cost less than the helicopter to operate, but the capital costs seem like they'd be much higher, especially since every orchard block would essentially be a custom job, and helicopters can be factory-built.
Maybe you could do double duty by also having a sprayer carriage that can use the same track?
The helicopter overcomes its own weight. So, a similarly effective ground based solution would have to push up so much air as to push into the ground with at least twice its weight (well, or be heavier than a heli). Might run a risk of getting stuck.
Next, the heli rotor blades are above the tree line, where there are no branches and no trunk. A ground based solution would necessarily be between the trunks. You'd have to not only protect the rotating blades by ducting them, but also have a much harder time navigating.
Finally, helicopters exist already and have other use cases. Ground based vehicle would have to be specifically designed and built, and would not be useful for much else.
Fantastic description of a helicopter flying job. The standby experience is no different from any other commercial (unscheduled) flying job but I am sure the competition is more intense. It has always been a mystery to me how helicopter pilots come into existence at all: it takes at least $30,000 in expenses (more if you are starting from scratch) to get the first useful rating (commercial) and then (I judge from my experience) no one would hire you since you do not have enough hours, no matter how dangerous the job might be. Instruction is one way but even then no one would even talk to you before you have at least 300 hours. Some tour pilots I know fly for $8 an hour to get the 1000 hours required for any real commercial job (like flying for an oil company and such). The author owns her helicopter so that is a bit different but now you have the associated risk and pressure to pay for your investment. My fixed wing ratings paid for themselves relatively quickly but I am still trying to get a helicopter job to pay for the rotorwing part. This article gave me some good ideas ...
Of course, but I do meet a lot of the ones that didn't. Those guys have a lot of perseverance, although many of them, just like me started in fixed wing.
My fixed wing ratings paid for themselves relatively quickly …
You must have gone a path other than immediately to CFI after you got your commercial fixed — or your idea of relatively quickly is a little more patient than mine.
Of course I do have a CFI, CFII, and MEI and they help. To pay off the $1000's spent on training, though, instruction is not enough, the only way is to fly in some inhospitable places: think Alaska, South America. One of my friends went to fly in Afghanistan for three months. While a bit extreme, that gig paid for all his ratings and a lot more, and gave him a lot of very valuable experience. I picked Alaska since I would rather be cold than to be shot at ...
I'm working my way though helicopter ratings right now. I finshed my private and instrument and am starting the commercial rating in a couple weeks. I'm using my GI Bill to pay for the training, it's way too expensive to justify doing it this late in life otherwise.
There are 2 routes to paying for flight training with the GI Bill that I'm aware of: through an "institute of higher learning" (usually a community college) or directly through a flight school. If you go with the first option, the VA will pay for the whole thing as long as your PPL instructors are employees of the college. If you go directly through a flight school the VA will only pay the lesser of $10,000/year or the actual cost of training.
Another benefit of going through a college is that the degree program has higher minimum flight hour requirements than the rating itself. At the school I went through, you had to fly 75 hours to finish the PPL semester even if it only took you 50 hours to get through the check ride. That means when you finish with CFII you have enough hours to start instructing right away.
If you are a veteran with post-9/11 GI Bill benefits remaining and want to be a pilot, now is an incredible time. The job market is booming and you can get the training free. Even if you have to pay out of pocket for the PPL (which I have heard has become the case since I started) it's still amazing.
Ha ha! What a fucking gigantic faggot! Look at all your shitty downvotes.
Look at how much more retarded your fucking dumb nigger remarks are than what everyone else has to say in this thread. Fuck you, you dumb shit. Rot in fucking hell. Eat nothing but shit.
I've got two cherry trees (in Oregon) and I have huge rot problems, both with blossoms and fruit. Maybe it's time to get a tethered drone and keep them dry.
Just some standing industrial fans running for a bit longer might do the trick if you only have two. I doubt a consumer drone would ever have enough CFM of airflow.
You're probably right. I'm also dreaming of a drone with a chainsaw attached so I can trim dangerous limbs in my yard but that would require even more CFM.
Something big or just further division of economic inequality? I don't see why this is an issue. I was literally eating black cherries for breakfast and stumbled upon this article. A few pounds of frozen cherries is only $10. Foods have never been cheaper for everyone.
A smaller percentage of people don't get enough to eat now than ever before in human history. Things aren't getting worse, but better, regardless is those better off use helicopters for agriculture.
> About three weeks before the cherries are ready to be picked, they are particularly vulnerable to threats that can damage them. One of those threats is water. When it rains, the water sticks to the cherries and can cause them to rot, split, or both. This makes the cherries far less valuable to buyers.
> Cherry growers have long tried to find ways to dry the cherries and prevent the rot/split problems. They put fans on tall poles in their orchards and run blowers up and down the rows. But this isn’t usually effective. Enough rain in those last few weeks can destroy the entire crop.
> Sometime in the past — maybe 10 or 15 years ago? — someone had the idea of using the downwash of helicopters hovering over the cherry trees to blow the branches around and shake the water off the cherries. This was extremely effective and apparently well worth the cost.
> “Cherry drying” by helicopter was born.
I was expecting something like spraying a desiccant. This is so much cooler. But pretty sad in terms of carbon emissions. Can this be done by drone?
Does this explain the whole cheaper class of split cherries you can buy during cherry season in New York, usually from street vendors?
If you think that a lightweight drone will give just as much wind power as a heavy helicopter, you need to think about F=MA a bit. The weight of the pilot (and supporting systems) act as balast against which the "fan" can push. Otherwise the fan would accelerate into the sky. More ballast = bigger fan, and a huuuuge fan is way better than a small fan given the problem at hand.
Couldn't something be sprayed on the cherries to reduce surface tension and inhibit mold/bacteria so the cherries would dry w/o cracking? Then you could spray the fields with a fixed-wing craft. Penetration into the tree foliage might be a hurdle as well as cleaning off whatever you sprayed afterwards. Nonetheless farmers use sprays for almost everything these days.
Using helicopters as dryers seems very kludgy, expensive, and dangerous and little more than a stop-gap measure until something better comes along.
Certainly a robotic mid-sized to large helicopter-like drone designed to primarily hover would be safer and cheaper. It could have long legs (taller than cherry trees) and fans on the side to assist drying and to reduce energy consumption (it could set on the ground during drying and only lift off to change trees). A little fuzzy logic to control positioning and movement and boom - a new product!
But for the longest time, starting about 20 years ago, I thought I had developed an allergy to apples because no matter what I did to clean them, including peeling the skin, I still had a badly itching throat and all my "usual" food allergy symptoms.
Then after I bought a property that had wild apple trees and i found that I could eat the sweet ones with no issues, and could also eat the apples growing at a friend's house, I realized there was something being sprayed on commercial apples that I had an allergic reaction to.
In short, the less crap that's sprayed onto my food, the better. So yeah, I'd rather pay more for cherries (I'm allergic to raw ones anyway!) than have to deal with the side effects of whatever water repellent is applied.
I know someone who has a severe reaction to anything corn-based. Of course, he's unable to eat just about any processed foods, but he also has to watch out for some produce, as it's often sprayed with a corn-based protectant.
In SA, rain in the JHB area is in the summer and in the Cape it's in the winter. So, either you try to plant in an area which harvests before the rain (JHB) or after the rain (the Cape).
In both cases you could end up trying to aim for a period where there is rain that falls overlapping the harvest period.
Wonder if there are any studies on lead accumulation in the fields and cherries. The R44 is probably burning on the order of 15 gallons per hour 100LL (Low Lead) drying cherries and the exhaust is directed downward. Each gallon has a little over 2g of lead in it.
This is an excellent point. The helicopter exhaust is probably deposited in its entirety on the cherry trees and in the field. I guess the Jetranger dried fields look almost 'organic' in comparison:) Hopefully, the FAA and the oil companies will eventually come up with a less toxic alternative to the 100LL (although they have been promising it for years now).
The R44 should be able to run 93E10 without too much modification or 93E0 with no modification but nobody wants a multi fuel solution so here we are :/
I know it a pipe dream, but I’ve been hoping we’ll all switch to diesels. JetA is so much cheaper. That being said I think probably ethanol will replace 100LL. It’s got a sufficient octane rating and the modifications needed to the engine and aircraft are pretty minor.
Ethanol is less energy-dense than 100LL, let alone JetA. This means you need to carry more of it as specific fuel consumption will go up by ~20% - 25% (estimate from the increased fuel consumption of multi-fuel car engines running on E85 (a mixture of ~85% ethanol with ~15% petrol).
Given the limited load capacity of aircraft I'd expect JetA to be the preferred route as that is actually more energy-dense than 100LL. Both ethanol as well as (something resembling) JetA can be made from renewable sources so there is no advantage either way in that respect.
That said it is not feasible to run an engine made for 100LL on JetA while conversion to ethanol in theory can be achieved without too much effort - bigger jets on a carburettor, adjusted injection mappings for fuel injection, all seals and gaskets need to be compatible with ethanol which tends to cause swelling and eventual failure in many types of synthetics.
I've converted a few motorcycle engines to run on E85 as that is a more economical fuel here in Sweden. I did the same for some smaller engines and am trying to get a chain saw to run reliably on this fuel. The big advantage here is that the exhaust fumes from E85 are far less noxious than those from petrol or syngas. The problem is that these are 2-stroke engines which depend on a fuel-oil mixture for crankcase lubrication. There are not that many suitable lubricants which mix well with E85.
> For me, that means spending a lot of time hanging around my RV at the golf course. (It’s almost unfortunate that I don’t golf.) It means having access to weather information and having something to do to keep busy so you don’t die of boredom
I've always thought a job with this feature (lots of down time) would be perfect for a developer who likes to hack on personal projects. E.g. liquor store owner
For me it would depend on how predictable the interruptions are. I would find it very challenging to get much done if I wasn't able to devote large enough blocks of concentrated time.
Is this natural for cherries? To be so vulnerable to a little water that they split/rot within a few hours? Seems odd, for a plant that lives outdoors.
Have cherries always been this way, across the centuries? Or is this an unexpected consequence of some GMO shenanigans?
Judging by the picture they're probably still good enough to be eaten by animals just not by choosy humans or good enough for the seed pits to still work. Remember ultimately the fruit is just a trick to get animals to eat and transport the seeds after all as long as a deer or bird is still willing to eat it and the seed doesn't die the fruit's job is done.
97 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadMany years ago, when I was young and foolish, I thought being a crop duster pilot was the bees knees; also easier to get into with low hours, and who knows, maybe after spraying enough potato, a coveted airline job. Little did I know! It turns out the level of skill required to do the job is very high, the lifestyle not so great when you get older, and no, it's not necessarily easier to get into.
Ultimately I didn't become a pilot, but an engineer. Looking back, I'm happy with my choice and my life as it is now. Only occasionally do I watch aviation videos on YouTube and wonder "what if".
Thank you for a really cool article - and kudos to the guy drying cherries with his little Robinson!
I do believe it probably says something about preconceived notions that, of the mere half dozen comments accumulated so far, this mistake has been made twice already.
And there was no ambiguity - the author's name, "Maria", was at the top of the article.
I suspect that most people tend to read in their own gender in absence of other cues? I have a strong memory of going through the first chapter of a book completely misgendering the protaganist. Fortunately it wasn't a "doctor -> man" bias situation, just "person walking through park describing view/situation", otherwise I'd have been super angry at myself.
Humans are.
https://www.wai.org/resources/waistats
I read the article very quickly at work, on my phone, so I missed certain parts. I have saved it though, so I can enjoy it later in peace and quiet.
I don't tend to look up the author's name.
And finally, English isn't my first language. When the gender isn't immediately obvious I default to my own.
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/learn-to-fly
I bet paying a pilot, who operates at price to cover their own expenses, fuel and a paycheck, is still less expensive than the partial loss of any harvest that receives this coverage, and crop dusting pilots are technically an equivalent operation, but I’m thinking that there are better ways to keep cherries dry, and that rain showers aren’t the only thing water log a cherry tree, right?
For whom? I think anyone who'd been near an operating helicopter and thought "gee, I need a really big fan once in a while" would've eventually put two and two together.
> * there are better ways to keep cherries dry, and that rain showers aren’t the only thing water log a cherry tree, right?*
Think about the plus sides- the grower doesn't have to buy a bunch of fans, deal with maintenance, or do any other number of things, and the helicopter pilot gets "guaranteed income" (though, like all growing is, that depends a lot upon the season), flying hours, and can so other things in the waiting time. Maria, the author of the blog post, mentions elsewhere that she makes jewelry in her waiting time, which she can then sell or do whatever with.
It's a big different from your standard 9-to-5 job, but personally, I think it's a beautiful symbiotic relationship.
I'd like to think you're being sarcastic here, but fear you may not be.
What's wrong with food being seasonal and local? Personally, I like it that what's available varies with the season; it gives me an extra incentive to try different things.
Meat only when it's snowing.
The result of industrialized food production and distribution has been a steady ongoing loss of food diversity. You can search for the stats from the FAO. I believe it's 75% of food diversity gone in the last century. 12 species providing for 75% of the world's nutritional needs.
The current system does not have food diversity as its goal, let alone taste or nutrition. It does a good job at nourishing the pockets of big businesses, that have an interest in turning all manner of food production and distribution into economies of scale by commoditizing (as in "commoditize your complements") the product. Uniformity and shelf-life win, farmers lose.
I've seen all this happen right where I live (Panama). Tasteless tomatoes, thanks to having Nestle as the main buyer. A local cultivar of Dioscorea (Yam) almost gone, when Frito Lay's told farmers what cultivar they wanted, which exposed the local cultivar to a disease. Countless edible plants and fruits, better suited for the climate and environment, have become simply unknown to people, as cattle farming took over thanks to the introduction of herbicides (it's also destroying the Darien rainforest, and violently displacing indigenous communities, btw). I could go on and on. Meanwhile, you have technicians (Ingenieros Agronomos) talking about such great achievements as tropicalized potatoes. It makes me think of the Great Irish Famine.
So there you have it, food from all around the planet, and the whole planet producing mostly the same. We are going full circle from abundance to scarcity. You have to then question people inferring rather unfoundedly that it is the abundance of food (along a sedentary lifestyle) what is driving the obesity-related chronic disease pandemic. You have to wonder what is abundance. Mindlessly following the commoditization trend has driven us to unquestioningly counting food only by such fungible measures as USD, kg, and calories, as if humans fed on food like cars feed on gas. And this brings us to that process that I think is parallel to the commoditization of food: the turning of humans into machines.
He says the cherries split or mold if left wet for a short time, so he has to be on call in all daylight hours (17h) ... but what about when it rains in the 7 nighttime hours? Is it the sun-drying of the wet cherries that causes the damage?
I wonder about these sort of pieces whether they're just equipping others to drive them or if business. He says it's already highly competitive, sounds like a firm could drive the soloists out of business by undercutting them (maybe that's happening now), then pushing up prices later.
I can't believe you can't undercut with a massive set of fans on a "cherry picker"-type vehicle (maybe paired with a shaker-harvest system).
Her name is Maria Langer, bio: https://www.aneclecticmind.com/bio/
FWIW the English generic pronoun is he.
I wonder if the author cares, what seems more pertinent is that she's an experienced pilot and good writer.
It's possible that rot is a long-term problem (cherries wet for more than one day) and the splitting is indeed caused very quickly by the rain / sun combination, but I think the issue is that the work is just too dangerous during night hours.
Makes me wonder if they couldn't use poly tunnels.
As cool as this all seems....if you happen to live near an orchard, or in my case, the helipad - it appears to be a horrible inefficient and nuisance way to solve the issue.
I do wish there was another option.
Flying at night is great. The air is usually smooth and stable. The lights below are nice to look at, especially near water. If things go wrong at night however, it can get ugly. The fatality rate for nighttime aviation accidents is significantly higher.
* Speed - 65 KIAS (best glide)
* At 200 ft AGL: Landing Lights - ON
* If you don't like what you see: Landing Lights - OFF
Yes, I was thinking mount some fans on top of those giant rolling irrigation rigs.
[1] https://grapecollective.com/articles/frost-fighters-the-heli...
[2] https://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/241735-flying-frost-protec...
[3] https://www.wineaustralia.com/getmedia/6740ada2-1be7-4e3e-b0...
Another common use of helicopters in a rural environment is aerial mustering, this one does not really need explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbMudWaYeXo
The fans they were likely talking about are probably the horizontal-style fans you see in orchards for (mainly) frost prevention (they look like small windmills).
But why not very large rotor fans - maybe mounted HVLS fans, perhaps a bit larger, and maybe spinning a bit faster. Surely something like those would be cheaper to install and run 24/7 - assuming they worked as well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK3fV6EbTOo
From my armchair I wonder what the reason is for not having a ground-based solution. Running a small vehicle (lawnmower-size?) with a fan mounted on top between the trees seems like a much more economic way to have the same effect.
Is there not enough space between the trees to pass through (but then, how would they harvest)?
Do the trees suffer, branches break if the air flow comes from below / from the side?
Obviously not all hp are equal and you get into a discussion of cfm, specific impulse, etc, etc. but power/area should be a pretty ok proxy for drying power.
It shouldn't be that hard to build something that looks like the bastard child of a concrete pumper and a pine mulch blower that can either fit in the bed of a pickup or runs off a tractor PTO and can apply more than enough airflow to destroy your crop if you use it wrong. Maybe include a big rubber hose (like those temporary water mains) on the vehicle to give the tree trunks a good whack as you drive by.
I imagine the important part of the "drying" process/action is being able to give the branches a bloody good shake to dislodge the water droplets. It's likely that even very large fans aren't capable of moving that much air (compared to a helicopter's blades). Then there's also the question of even if you could trundle around the orchard with a set of fans able to push that much air I can imagine it would be comedically unstable and dangerous :)
[edit: typo]
I imagine your typical 5-ish liter v8 coupled to a big centrifugal blower is more than capable of providing a "bloody good shake"
The capital costs to get ground-supported fans above the trees and the maintenance costs of operating them are likely much higher than just buying your own helicopter and training as a RW pilot. Given that, the farmer might as well rent the helicopter and RW pilot.
I imagine a 10m fan mounted in a moving carriage, on a serpentine track supported by tall poles, and powered by electrified rails in the track. Then you'd need a shed for the working fan, the backup fan, and the repair parts, plus the generator and fuel storage. It would cost less than the helicopter to operate, but the capital costs seem like they'd be much higher, especially since every orchard block would essentially be a custom job, and helicopters can be factory-built.
Maybe you could do double duty by also having a sprayer carriage that can use the same track?
The helicopter overcomes its own weight. So, a similarly effective ground based solution would have to push up so much air as to push into the ground with at least twice its weight (well, or be heavier than a heli). Might run a risk of getting stuck.
Next, the heli rotor blades are above the tree line, where there are no branches and no trunk. A ground based solution would necessarily be between the trunks. You'd have to not only protect the rotating blades by ducting them, but also have a much harder time navigating.
Finally, helicopters exist already and have other use cases. Ground based vehicle would have to be specifically designed and built, and would not be useful for much else.
You must have gone a path other than immediately to CFI after you got your commercial fixed — or your idea of relatively quickly is a little more patient than mine.
There are 2 routes to paying for flight training with the GI Bill that I'm aware of: through an "institute of higher learning" (usually a community college) or directly through a flight school. If you go with the first option, the VA will pay for the whole thing as long as your PPL instructors are employees of the college. If you go directly through a flight school the VA will only pay the lesser of $10,000/year or the actual cost of training.
Another benefit of going through a college is that the degree program has higher minimum flight hour requirements than the rating itself. At the school I went through, you had to fly 75 hours to finish the PPL semester even if it only took you 50 hours to get through the check ride. That means when you finish with CFII you have enough hours to start instructing right away.
If you are a veteran with post-9/11 GI Bill benefits remaining and want to be a pilot, now is an incredible time. The job market is booming and you can get the training free. Even if you have to pay out of pocket for the PPL (which I have heard has become the case since I started) it's still amazing.
Look at how much more retarded your fucking dumb nigger remarks are than what everyone else has to say in this thread. Fuck you, you dumb shit. Rot in fucking hell. Eat nothing but shit.
You are fucking worthless.
Something big is coming, and I feel like I’m going to get the business end of it.
> Cherry growers have long tried to find ways to dry the cherries and prevent the rot/split problems. They put fans on tall poles in their orchards and run blowers up and down the rows. But this isn’t usually effective. Enough rain in those last few weeks can destroy the entire crop.
> Sometime in the past — maybe 10 or 15 years ago? — someone had the idea of using the downwash of helicopters hovering over the cherry trees to blow the branches around and shake the water off the cherries. This was extremely effective and apparently well worth the cost.
> “Cherry drying” by helicopter was born.
I was expecting something like spraying a desiccant. This is so much cooler. But pretty sad in terms of carbon emissions. Can this be done by drone?
Does this explain the whole cheaper class of split cherries you can buy during cherry season in New York, usually from street vendors?
Using helicopters as dryers seems very kludgy, expensive, and dangerous and little more than a stop-gap measure until something better comes along.
Certainly a robotic mid-sized to large helicopter-like drone designed to primarily hover would be safer and cheaper. It could have long legs (taller than cherry trees) and fans on the side to assist drying and to reduce energy consumption (it could set on the ground during drying and only lift off to change trees). A little fuzzy logic to control positioning and movement and boom - a new product!
But for the longest time, starting about 20 years ago, I thought I had developed an allergy to apples because no matter what I did to clean them, including peeling the skin, I still had a badly itching throat and all my "usual" food allergy symptoms.
Then after I bought a property that had wild apple trees and i found that I could eat the sweet ones with no issues, and could also eat the apples growing at a friend's house, I realized there was something being sprayed on commercial apples that I had an allergic reaction to.
In short, the less crap that's sprayed onto my food, the better. So yeah, I'd rather pay more for cherries (I'm allergic to raw ones anyway!) than have to deal with the side effects of whatever water repellent is applied.
In SA, rain in the JHB area is in the summer and in the Cape it's in the winter. So, either you try to plant in an area which harvests before the rain (JHB) or after the rain (the Cape).
In both cases you could end up trying to aim for a period where there is rain that falls overlapping the harvest period.
Given the limited load capacity of aircraft I'd expect JetA to be the preferred route as that is actually more energy-dense than 100LL. Both ethanol as well as (something resembling) JetA can be made from renewable sources so there is no advantage either way in that respect.
That said it is not feasible to run an engine made for 100LL on JetA while conversion to ethanol in theory can be achieved without too much effort - bigger jets on a carburettor, adjusted injection mappings for fuel injection, all seals and gaskets need to be compatible with ethanol which tends to cause swelling and eventual failure in many types of synthetics.
I've converted a few motorcycle engines to run on E85 as that is a more economical fuel here in Sweden. I did the same for some smaller engines and am trying to get a chain saw to run reliably on this fuel. The big advantage here is that the exhaust fumes from E85 are far less noxious than those from petrol or syngas. The problem is that these are 2-stroke engines which depend on a fuel-oil mixture for crankcase lubrication. There are not that many suitable lubricants which mix well with E85.
I've always thought a job with this feature (lots of down time) would be perfect for a developer who likes to hack on personal projects. E.g. liquor store owner
Is this natural for cherries? To be so vulnerable to a little water that they split/rot within a few hours? Seems odd, for a plant that lives outdoors.
Have cherries always been this way, across the centuries? Or is this an unexpected consequence of some GMO shenanigans?